A few weeks ago we are scheduled to see The World of Extreme Happiness. Neither of us feels like going on the day we are supposed to, so we exchange our tickets for a matinee today, which also happens to be Meredith's birthday.
Great, we both think at the time. We'll go out to lunch first, then see what sounds like an upbeat play; it'll be a nice way to celebrate.
This morning I call Meredith. "Would you mind if we don't have lunch before or dinner after?" she asks. I don't. We both have too much to do before the play, and 3:30 is too early to have dinner; the play is only 90 minutes.
I arrive early to pick up our tickets. The woman in front of me says to the woman in the box office, "Can I get any extreme happiness today?" The unsmiling box-office worker replies, "You could have yesterday, but not today." The patron picks up her ticket and says nothing. It's an unusual exchange, to say the least.
Meredith arrives. We settle into our seats. The play opens.
Act 1, Scene One:
A young girl living in rural China in 1992 is about to give birth. She speaks mostly in obscenities. Her indifferent husband, in the same scene, describes a bird pooping on his face and into his mouth. Then the baby is born. It's a girl, so the infant is immediately discarded into a bucket of pig slop. But the girl is a fighter and surprises everyone and lives. She is named Sunny Li.
This all happens in the first ten minutes of the play. Hmmm. Maybe the title doesn't mean the obvious.
The rest of the story follows Sunny as she moves to the city and becomes a factory worker, and later a rebel, of sorts. As the curtain falls — SPOILER ALERT — Sunny, in a mostly vegetative state, is suffocated by her brother.
I turn to Meredith and whisper, "Happy birthday."
Seeing Hamlet would have been cheerier.
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